"If you’re a teacher, you point out, ‘This was a time when …’ but we can’t whitewash the past, because the past is what we’re reacting against.... Do you ban a genius for their sexual practices? There would be millions of people who if you looked closely enough at their personal life you would disqualify them. You can’t ban people. I hate cancel culture. It has become quite hysterical and there’s a kind of witch-hunt and a lack of understanding."
Said Helena Bonham Carter, quoted in "Helena Bonham Carter: Good on young men for finding middle-aged beauty sexy/The London Library’s first female president on why she thinks Johnny Depp has been ‘vindicated’ and the ‘horrendous’ treatment of JK Rowling" (London Times).
Tippex? Oh! It's their Wite-Out.
About JK Rowling: "It’s horrendous, a load of bollocks. I think she has been hounded... It’s been taken to the extreme, the judgmentalism of people. She’s allowed her opinion, particularly if she’s suffered abuse. Everybody carries their own history of trauma and forms their opinions from that trauma and you have to respect where people come from and their pain. You don’t all have to agree on everything — that would be insane and boring. She’s not meaning it aggressively, she’s just saying something out of her own experience.... No one can talk about ideas [on Twitter]; it becomes polarised and is war, and people waste days being angry inside their head."
About Harry Potter movie actors who attack Rowling: "Personally I feel they should let her have her opinions, but I think they’re very aware of protecting their own fan base and their generation. It’s hard."
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There would be millions of people who if you looked closely enough at their personal life you would disqualify them.
Anacoluthon.
Grammar is what some people (the ones who write the books) think everyone who speaks English should follow their rules.
Coleridge mocked "new moral discoveries," the moral being eternal.
He was pretty good at moral reasoning, with essays that vastly eclipsed his poetical output.
It isn't that the modern moralists lack empathy for Rowling's past but that they're a mob of morons.
You can’t ban people.
Sure you can.
But first you need to be in control of who gets banned.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a cheating, lying asshole who owed everybody money.
Get the bulldozer. We can all play this game. The rules are fungible.
I hate cancel culture. It has become quite hysterical and there’s a kind of witch-hunt and a lack of understanding.
Bravo for that. But here's her blind spot...
About JK Rowling: "It’s horrendous, a load of bollocks. I think she has been hounded... It’s been taken to the extreme, the judgmentalism of people. She’s allowed her opinion, particularly if she’s suffered abuse. Everybody carries their own history of trauma and forms their opinions from that trauma and you have to respect where people come from and their pain. You don’t all have to agree on everything — that would be insane and boring. She’s not meaning it aggressively, she’s just saying something out of her own experience...
Her sensitivity is her blind spot. She's incredibly sensitive. Like a lot of artists, right? And that's a sensitive argument for not-judging and giving people space to speak.
But in her sensitivity, there is a kernel of identity politics. It's this idea that people who have suffered have rights over the rest of us.
"Shut up! You have not suffered enough to speak! You are white! You are male! Your parents are probably still married! And you had a golden retriever! You are privileged and you need to be silenced!"
It's that fucking claim of victimhood that leads to the cancel culture madness that upsets her. If liberals want to know who created these Woke little monsters, it was you. You fucking did it. You and your educational monopoly and your hierarchies of pain.
Also, of course, the unbelievably stupid assumption that white males have never suffered anything, and to assume victimhood based on race and gender.
Our children have been badly taught. Very badly. It's going to take years -- maybe decades -- to fix the damage caused by the one-party state in our universities.
We can’t coerce the past into our present values, even though it’s evidence we’ve [changed]
FIFT.
This reflects the final flame-out phase of yin (female) social calculations. Cancellation is a social process. You can't cancel yang (male) accomplishments upon pain of death. Einstein cheated on his wives, but his work remains. Nuclear knowledge remains. All sorts of 'evil' military commanders won their wars and changed the world. Genghis Khan. Alexander in Greece. Rome. Etc.
In the fiction realm, we all know that Han Solo shot first. This behavior obviously kept a mercenary alive, but he too was cancelled upon Star Wars re-release. We all know that JK Rowling wrote the Potter books and the social crowd hates their lack of control over shallow moral 'purity.'
Cancel-mania ends with true life-or-death needs and not being able to ignore those who do without asking. Fiction and Hollywood do not reflect life-or-death needs. ANTIFA and the Woke only half understand this, as they've rarely or never faced real competition or true challenges.
Hard times make for tough people.
Easy times make for soft people.
It's this idea that people who have suffered have rights over the rest of us.
That very same clause - about Rowling's being entitled to her opinion particularly because she has suffered - stopped me short too. Your suffering may make your opinion more understandable to other people, but as long as we (I should say "we) believe that suffering is a predicate for having an opinion at all, we're not going to get anywhere towards reclaiming the liberal society we tried to establish.
The problem I have with Rowling is she'd be the one doing the cancelling if she weren't being cancelled...
"it becomes polarised and is war"
Still a little native. The war is one-sided: progs fight, progs cancel, progs squash speech.
Bonham-Carter's sentiments are nice. But until the nice liberals attack progressivism as such, its hegemony, its lust for power, its ruthless attack on the values they hold dear, nothing will change.
What struck me was the use of the word "judgmentalism". Back in the 80s my wife and I had a mutual friend who thought that the greatest personal sin was to be 'judgmental". Which was sort of amusing because the lady in question was an Assistant DA who prosecuted people.
But times change. In the early 1960s I sat in an interfraternity meeting listening to a sorority official (mid 30s, pill box hat, white gloves, St. John knit suit) decrying changes in society which would ban discrimination. After all she'd been taught to have discriminating taste in all things.
I dunno. I think that it's okay to make judgments about the character of people you meet--and to be able to discriminate between Chateau Thames Embankment and a decent Pinot Noir. As for cancel culture--I've got a judgment on that as well. And it's not favorable.
She speaks for her generation and respects the young actors for doing the same. I hope they'll be as considerate in return.
"Personally I feel they should let her have her opinions, but I think they’re very aware of protecting their own fan base and their generation. It’s hard."
It's not hard. Grow some balls. People respect balls. Stand for something. People also respect other people who actually consistently stand for something honorable. What's honorable, you might ask?
I would put it in the same category as Justice Potter Stewart did with pornography. You know it when you see it.
Have at it.
As an aside, yesterday I happened to watch a Woody Allen movie. I forgot how much I liked his movies. He's a wreck as a human being, but a great movie maker. I'm a pretty decent human being, but I suck at making movies. We need some sucky people around doing what they do best. We don't have to love them, but we can love what they produce.
She's hot AF. She had to be to pull off Marla in Fight Club.
The 'Harry Potter' actors should be kissing the ground that JK walks upon.
They went from zero to a life of unimaginable luxury thanks to her.
Herbert Asquith's great-granddaughter. Her grandmother Violet Bonham Carter was also in Liberal politics. Her mother's side of the family, half Spanish, half French Jewish, was also prominent.
HBC is a case of arrested development, but not in a bad way. There was something childlike about her in her early roles. Now, in her fifties, there's something youthful about her. Being an actress and having all the make-up artists helps. She seems like a very animated and lively and original person, and that does a lot, too. Maybe it also has something to do with walking the very thin style line between daring ultra chic and dotty bag lady.
the greatest personal sin was to be 'judgmental"
I think "judgmentalism" is called "rigid thinking" now which makes you "autistic" or "OCD" or both and qualifies you for special breaks in school.
Also you can go around judging people for not understanding you're "autistic" or "OCD" or both and need special breaks.
The stuff you learn on Reddit!
Saint Croix nails it. HBC says "you have to respect where people come from and their pain" yet then a few lines later, complains that no one can talk about ideas on Twitter. The whole point of talking about ideas is that they are just that: ideas, and a central tenet of Enlightenment philosophy is that the ideas one talks about don't have to reflect "lived experience" let alone "pain" for those ideas to be considered on their merits. The passage quoted is depressingly revelatory of how pre-Musk Twitter had coarsened public discourse.
As someone said, JK Rowling is just Trotsky being cancelled by Stalin. She was running around calling everyone a fascist/nazi/racist and demanding they be destroyed. But now, the PC Police are knocking on *her* door and taking her to the Gulag.
So, now she feels differently. I'll take some of that free speech on the 2nd shelf, please. Hold the SJW.
LOL!
you point out, ‘This was a time when …’ but we can’t whitewash the past, because the past is what we’re reacting against
The hubris of thinking that you know better than those who went before you. It's bad enough in teenagers and folks in their 20s, it is devastating on a cultural level.
Nearly all of the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries were the result of "progressive" ideas.
"Hi, I'm HBC and I'm here - oh, I know I'm about 5 years or more too late but at least I tried! - to talk about how cancel culture is bad and we need less of it. After all, it's taking out too many people on *our* side now!"
Her commentary is about as spent as the cancer-ridden character she played in "Terminator Salvation". Thanks for playing, hun; where were you 'n your fawning friends when it mattered?
@Enigma, you left out half the lines:
Hard times make for tough people.
Tough people make easy times.
Easy times make for soft people.
Soft people create hard times.
Progress is an unqualified, monotonic process: one step forward, two steps backward. Lose your ethical religion.
I hate cancel culture.
You lust for it. Political congruence ("="), D[iversity]IE, feminism/masculinism, reproductive rites... Admit it: #HateLovesAbortion, mitigate progress, divergence, embrace development with a fitness function where men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature/nature from conception 'till death do us part.
What did HBC think those ingrates were protecting their fan bases and generations from? Horrible ideas that might make them uncomfortable? If your principles depend on not angering your fans, they’re pretty malleable principles. You
I was neutral on HBC. Now I like her. Her comments were about as reasonable as you can get and not have your career crushed, perhaps even more than she ca get away with without cost.
Good for her
Tippex. And doing a bit of hoovering, by the light of a torch.
Daniel Radcliff (Harry in the referenced younger actors who should kiss Rowling's feet everyday and twice on Sunday) had quite the thing for HBC. She has the letter he wrote her to prove it.
As James Lileks put it about cancel culture (paraphrasing) They flense a person until they find a crooked bone then claim it's the backbone.
"What struck me was the use of the word 'judgmentalism.' Back in the 80s my wife and I had a mutual friend who thought that the greatest personal sin was to be 'judgmental.' Which was sort of amusing because the lady in question was an Assistant DA who prosecuted people."
There is no innate contradiction here: forming personal judgements against others is entirely different than being an employed participant in a legal proceeding designed to determine whether a person is or is not legally responsible for specific violations of the law, according to the available evidence and witness testimony. And it is the jury that makes the final judgement, not the prosecuting attorney.
Now, if your friend was, in her life, personally judgemental of others, therein would lie the contradiction between her words and actions.
Daniel Radcliff (Harry in the referenced younger actors who should kiss Rowling's feet everyday and twice on Sunday) had quite the thing for HBC. She has the letter he wrote her to prove it.
People who like sexy HBC might enjoy Novocaine where she seduces Steve Martin the dentist and wrecks his life. Fun!
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